By Willa Umansky PZ ’27

I’m in some room nowhere, the room is the world and nothing exists beyond its walls. Like I said, some room nowhere. The room has wooden walls and a muddy-colored carpet, and there is a grain on my vision that makes it feel like 1997, even though I only know what the 90s looked like from pictures. Maybe that’s the point, though. It’s like I’m living in a picture from a camera that had to be developed at a CVS. Yes, that’s what it looks like. I’m on the ground as if having been wounded and I look down as if to discover blood on my hands and its source, my mouth slightly agape and eyes wide in a fearful panic. My legs are folded to the right of me, I think I’m draped in a baggy and soft cotton white shirt with a heavy gold necklace pinning down the neckline. I hear soft sobs echoing around me. When I look to inspect my hands for blood, I realize that I have been hugging the wooden leg of a chair, maybe oak? I don’t know wood. I just know it was dark and deep. Walnut, perhaps. Nestled between the legs of the chair, I notice the legs of a man. The legs have faint spots, the kind of faded purple spots that old people have on their skin seemingly just to further the distinction between the young and old. They’re not lesions or anything quite serious, just marks. Perhaps that of the devil or that of the good Lord. Maybe that’s why you get them when you’re old, maybe it really is to mark which bodies bear souls worthy of God’s eternal kingdom or which ones should suffer. Maybe it’s meant to mark which bodies will become birds in the next life and which ones will become horses. Which will become clouds and which will become aliens on the periphery of the known universe. Maybe they’re just marks from thin blood or sun exposure or something else practical. I still hear weeping.  

The closer leg, human not chair, is inches away from my face. The skin is humid from my heavy breaths. I might be crying. The hair is thin and sparse, but I can still tell that it’s a man’s leg. The hair is thin and sparse as if meant to emasculate the person that the leg belongs to. “You’re old now. So let me take not only your strength and warp your reflection, but I’ll also be taking the hair off your body to further your status as an infantile creature.” The leg is limp and as I look up and around further, so are the other limbs and their subsequent appendages. A tight potbelly catches my eye. The belly is fluttering from unsteady breaths. It’s hard and fat, shocking to the eye when the thin legs below are noted to be attached. The belly is sheltered by a gray cotton shirt that I somehow know bears long sleeves, despite me not having taken in beyond his torso yet. The shirt is a solid medium gray, not heather but not charcoal. I let my gaze travel up to confirm my suspicions of the shirt having long sleeves. Tears stain the chest of this medium gray shirt. The arms are bone and saggy skin, this I can see through the medium gray sleeves that adorn this show of old age. 

The cries don’t stop and I hear a little boy calling out for his mother, he’s in agony. 

The hands attached to the arms are holding a piece of paper, flailing it around—kind of. I’m not certain of what the paper is, in a tangible way. I can’t see what it says, though it’s close enough to read and not explicitly blurred. But my heart and head are certain that this piece of paper is his Will, and I know it’s his ticket to see mom. I’m finding myself referencing it to calm him down, like it’s something he should be thankful to have and look forward to making use of. I’m not speaking out loud, in fact everything is mute except for the cries. But I’m grabbing the paper, showing it to him and pleading with him to take a breath and know that everything is going to be fine. Not in so many words. The bile in my stomach boils up to my throat and I’m stuck pointlessly swallowing, vigorously, in hopes of beating an inevitable emission of stomach acid and misery.

He’s screaming out for his mom now, it’s incessant and I think there’s vomit dribbling down my chin as I start rocking because the pain is in my body now. He doesn’t quite form words or sentences but I can tell he wants to be a little boy again. He wants his mother to be young again. He wants to feel small in the arms of his mother. Whimpers have turned to screeches. He’s in anguish. 

It’s my grandfather. His mouth is moving in that rudimentary way when he’s having a shit day being more person than Parkinsons. It’s primitive, jejune. Like a baby teething, but he’s chewing on nothing so it’s just a mouth with no motor skills. He’s crying so hard and moving his hands rhythmically, displaying the absolute lack of control that he has over his body. He’s still flailing around that paper and I’m still pointing to it. His leathery cheeks are soaked. His doughy jowls clutch fallen tears, like a spider web seizes drops of rain, only his jaw is much weaker and far more limp than the tight hold of a stiffly wound web. Bad metaphor. Good contrast? His nose has taken the shape of the residue of something that once was, a melted candle or wilted flowers. 

It’s an excruciating thing to bear witness to, flashes of younger me and younger him come in like smoke from the mountains. We drove with the top down in the car through the hills, just us two. That was the first time I ever sat in the front seat of a car. He smiled and looked a bit like Dad.

Please stop crying, please. Please. Please, I can’t take it.

My cheeks are soaked and my shirt is stained by the contents of my stomach. He just wants his mommy. I’m clutching the corners of the Will, trying to fight the way that he’s crumpling the paper, to make it clear to him what he’s holding. I try to tell him that she’s waiting for him. His breathing grows more unsteady and his cries grow louder and I don’t know what else to do.

The whole room comes into view, including and especially myself. I know this pain won’t stop, once you know it’s there, it’s perpetual. I’m watching myself realize the perennial torture that exists beyond ignorance. Death was realized young by the girl I see crumpled at the leg of a chair which she’s clutching. Her shit stained shirt is a marker of the ineffable pain that’s being shoved through her every pore.

My room is dark except for the glow emanating from my half open computer that’s playing some seven hour long video about the Roman empire. I have to pee.